Jun 2 Property and Substance Dualism

Substance dualism and property
dualism are two positions in the philosophy of mind, and they’re trying to
answer questions like “Hey what’s the relationship between the mental and
the physical?” or “what’s up with consciousness?"

According to substance dualism,
mental things and physical things are two totally different kinds of things.
It would probably mean that no matter how much we study the brain, even if we
managed to achieve a perfect understanding of the brain’s crazy
intricate inner workings, it won’t be enough to understand the mind, or
our mental experiences of subjective consciousness, because we’re looking at
the wrong fucking thing. "Hey, quit studying that brain, it’s not even
the right goddamn substance, you idiot.” Maybe if we figured out how the
brain and the mind hook up, we’d learn something about the mind, but if
substance dualism is true, then no amount of information about the brain would
ever be enough to fully explain how the mind works.

According to property dualism, though,
there’s only one kind of substance, and it just has different kinds of
properties. So we only have to look at one thing, the brain, and that’s where
we’d find both mental properties and physical properties. If we fully
understood the brain, we’d have enough information to also explain but also, it
would mean there’s a bunch more shit to understand about the brain than if
substance dualism is true.

That seems simple enough – let’s
just keep looking at the brain and if we get to the end and we still don’t
understand the mind, we’re done, right? But here’s the problem: how do we know
when we’re at the end?

Like let’s say we could go to God
and say "Hey, God, we think we’ve figured this brain shit out but we still
don’t know the deal with the mind. Can you check our work?” God would read
what we’ve got so far and then He might say one of two things.

If substance dualism is true he
might say, “Oh, yeah, this is pretty much all right, you’ve got the brain
figured out, but you’ve been looking in the wrong place the whole time you
idiots."

If property dualism is true,
though, he might say "Oh, no, see, you got all the physical parts of the
brain, sure, but there’s extra shit in there you have to explain, like how
consciousness arises. Yeah, sorry dude, you have more work to do on the brain
after all."

The tradeoffs between substance
dualism and property dualism are actually really common tradeoffs in
metaphysics. A lot of times when we have two competing theories, they compete
in a specific way: one has simpler, more obvious explanations but also a
lot more shit in it, and the other one only requires like one or two things
to make it work but the explanations are banana-pants complicated.
Sometimes we call these two kinds of theories abundant and sparse
respectively.

And you can see why this might happen, right? If we could explain the entire
universe using photons, we would. Why complicate things? But we can’t explain
the entire universe just in terms of photons, so we have to add things.
So when it comes to how many things, property dualism gets to be like
"Ew, why the fuck do you have an entire separate kind of thing? Where
does it come from? What does it even look like? That’s so extravagant and
unnecessary, what’re you, new money? Is your granddad even rich?” and substance dualism has to be like
“Hey shut up so what if it’s totally invisible and we utterly lack a
description of how it might work."

On the other hand, when it comes to
explaining what they’re trying to explain (in this case, something like
‘the nature of consciousness’),Substance dualism gets to just say
"this is easy, the mental is just a whole 'nother fucking thing, that’s
the explanation” while property dualism has to be all “What if the
way consciousness comes from the brain is [RESPECTED BUT CONTROVERSIAL BOOK
LENGTH EXPLANATION]."

This is as always oversimplifying
things but what it comes down to is, when we eliminate shit from our theories,
we have to make the other shit explain more – we have to somehow explain
everything that we used to have extra shit for. Sometimes those explanations are
really simple and elegant, like when Copernicus went "Oh look, just put
the sun in the middle?” and sometimes it seems bizarre and improbable,
like where Dan Dennett is like “oh consciousness is just a bunch of
metaphors I guess” and it’s like hmm. Usually we’re somewhere in
the middle: which theory you’d prefer is a function of just how many things
you’re willing to tolerate vs. how hand-wavy you think an explanation is.

I should say that if I’m not
mistaken, most contemporary debates aren’t even between property dualists and
substance dualists anymore, they’re mostly between property dualists and some
form of eliminativists, who want to go a step further and eliminate the
idea of even separate kinds of properties. Those motherfuckers want to
take candy away from all the babies, which means they have a ton of
explaining to do and not a lot of resources to do it with.